Teoda made Aelfeva try on the chemise, which was dyed a very pale pink instead of being creamy-pale. It had a stripe of bright multi-coloured embroidery from the waist down on both sides, and more on the bottom in a stripe and around the cuffs of the close-fitting sleeves.

“How can you possibly make this longer?” Aelfeva asked. “The embroidery runs right down to the hem.”

“There are multiple tricks we could use,” Teoda said. “The embroidery isn’t on the dress itself, it’s on a strip of linen sewn onto the dress so it was easier to do and can be reused, but removing that and adding more fabric by hiding the seam under the embroidery would take a lot of sewing if we could even find appropriate fabric. So what we’ll do in this case is add it in farther up where it won’t be visible at all, and place the seams carefully so they don’t chafe. Could you stand on your trunk, please, so I can see how much I need to add to it?”

Sewing was clearly more complex even than Aelfeva had thought. She obliged, and Teoda dropped to one knee, inspecting it. “A little less than the width of my hand will do it. Dara? Where’s the overdress?”

Ilduara handed it to Aelfeva, who pulled it on and adjusted the laces at the sides.

This layer was a much deeper shade of the same rosy pink, and matching embroidery adorned the skirt in a stripe along the bottom and along both side slits; the sleeves were much longer than on an everyday dress, and has the same kind of embroidery along the edges.

“There’s nowhere on this that won’t show,” Aelfeva pointed out.

“I know,” Teoda said. “And we don’t have more of the same fabric. If you can’t hide alterations, then make them look like a deliberate choice to add a bit of extra flair. It’ll be fine, Aelf, I promise. Dara and I are fast, and possibly our mothers would like something to keep their hands busy. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours, and what else do we have to do? The colours don’t really match with your necklace, but I know you aren’t going to be willing to take that off, so we’ll just work around it.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Ilduara agreed. “I’m not as good at fancy sewing and design as Teoda, but we’ve both spent so much time hemming linens for the inn that we’re very fast at straight seams.”

“And I am absolutely no use to help,” Aelfeva sighed, stepping carefully down from the trunk. The fancier dress felt different; she wondered what it looked like on her. Probably not that different from how it looked on Leofeva at the last holiday, since they had the same colouring and not-dissimilar builds, but she still wondered. “I can sew leather harness, but I’d make a mess of anything this fine.”

“Sewing is a skill you learn,” Teoda said. “You have many and varied skills, but haven’t had a reason to learn this one. All right, I know how much to lengthen it. At least you’re close enough in size to Leo that we don’t need to make any adjustments to her clothes aside from length. You can take that off now.”

Aelfeva obeyed, switching to a clean plain chemise and the plain orange dress.

“Your job,” Teoda added, folding the pink dress neatly while Ilduara did the chemise, “is to make a decision about what you want.”

“Also not a skill I have.”

“Learn it,” Ilduara said. “This isn’t something anyone else can answer for you.”

“I know. There’s an awful lot to it. Including things like surrendering some legal rights.”

“We do better here than in some countries,” Teoda said. “Much better than some, from some of our parents’ stories. But yes, that too. We don’t know whether you’d be fertile, but if so, there are things like menstruation, which is not avoidable, and pregnancy and childbirth and nursing, which are as long as you’re careful and know what to do. That would involve having sex, and you should decide how you feel about that, although I don’t believe Jos would ever try to bully you into it.”

“Jos has Sadrilde as an alternative, as long as I agree to that.” Growing up with three girls had meant learning from them about subjects their respective parents would be unlikely to share with male children. It all sounded messy and possibly unpleasant, but not necessarily enough to tip the scales.

“That helps. I don’t think it’s worth trying to convince Rosebridge that you’re a Glaedwin cousin, so we’ll just have to tell them that there was magic and a goddess’ blessing involved, and they’ll just have to accept that. Some will, of course, do that more easily than others, but only the mad would expect you to fit neatly into the social role of a proper subservient wife. As long as Jos supports you, they can’t do much except gripe and they’ll get used to it.”

“Legal, social, biological, emotional... untangling how I feel about all of that should be easy, right?” Aelfeva rolled her eyes.

“I know. But work on it. My sewing things are at our house. Maybe you should stay here where it’s quieter with less distraction.”

“You’re probably right. Thanks.”

The sisters left.

Aelfeva prowled around her room. Not that it was her room, really, just a place to sleep and keep her things for seven nights before they went back to Rosebridge and home. She’d been expecting, when they’d arrived, to simply return to the same room she’d had since she was old enough to need her own space. The core of the Glaedwin house was the great timber hall built generations ago, when everyone lived and worked, ate and slept, all in a single room, family and servants and, at the time, they’d had slaves as well. Over time it had been modified to match changing tastes: windows enlarged and covered with translucent vellum in the winter to keep out the wind, replacing the open hearth with a proper fireplace, a loft at each end though it remained open in the centre all the way to the thatched roof, and then the construction of additions, especially one that allowed the family to have privacy and personal rooms. There were no more slaves, and the servants mostly had their own houses in Rosebridge; the exceptions had the lofts to sleep in, not the broad benches built into the sides of the hall.

The Denisot house had been built entirely by Josceran’s grandparents, and was more modern in design, though with hints of tradition; the Fishing Fox was entirely modern, Ximeno and Vituccia having bought the small original tavern that offered pallets by the fire and rebuilt it into a proper inn with a tavern on the ground floor and a kitchen behind it, living quarters for the family in a wing to one side, and several guest rooms of varying sizes and comfort, including one that had several beds all in one large room.

Nothing like the townhouses existed in Rosebridge, certainly. It was pleasant, luxurious even, but it was still alien. And, in a sense, this was Aelfeva’s space. Aelfric had, quite literally, never set foot in this room.

A tap at the half-open door made her spin around hastily. “Yes?”

Josceran pushed the door aside. “Need someone to rant at or complain to or generally just listen while you think? I’ll leave you alone if you’d rather.”

“No, come in.”

He did, and instead of taking the armchair, its seat and back woven of heavy wool yarn in bright colours stretched tight within the wooden frame, he sprawled across the bed on his stomach, crossed his arms, and looked at her expectantly.

“You get a say in this too,” Aelfeva said, dropping into the chair.

“No I don’t. Even if you choose to spend the rest of your life as a woman, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything as far as sex, let alone children. Aside from very specific issues like that, it doesn’t have any direct effect on me. You’re you, either way. This is completely about you.”

“You couldn’t just simplify my life by telling me which one you think I should do? Or which you’d prefer?”

“Not a chance.”

“You are exasperating sometimes.”

“I thought that was already understood.”

“What am I supposed to do, imagine a scale and put pebbles on each side until I run out of things that could be relevant and see which side is heavier? That won’t help, some things weigh more than others and I don’t have the slightest idea what some of them weigh.”

“Then just list them, for now.”

“As Aelfeva I lose a few legal rights, the biggest one being that I’d be unable to sign contracts in my own name and you’d have to ratify them, including anything involving giving or requesting credit. I would, however, still have my own property and the right to do what I want with it, including selling it, and there are some specific sorts of contract agreements around my property and craft that you don’t need to sign. I can’t even begin to guess what would happen socially in Rosebridge. I’d prefer not to move somewhere no one ever met Aelfric.”

“Rosebridge is eight hundred or so adults, most of whom were born in Rosebridge and most of them have never been anywhere else overnight—that’s why they give Ximeno things to trade for them when he makes a trip to Blaecstan. I imagine they’ll do what they usually do. Some will say rude things, some will mutter about this sort of thing not happening under the previous King and what is the world coming to, some will treat you differently and some will treat you the same... and after a while they’ll mostly just forget there was anything to grumble about.”

“That sounds plausible. Inheritance within my family will become complete chaos and will have to be recalculated right from the beginning, but I honestly don’t believe that my parents will try to be stingy with my settlement. My mother is confused. My father... He’s angry right now but when it comes right down to it, a lot of that anger is on my behalf because he couldn’t protect me from something he sees as an unequivocal injury. He honestly does want his children settled happily. He just might judge that by different standards. He’s going to see financial security as the biggest factor, I suspect. I just need to convince him that I’ll be fine.”

“I hope so.”

“I’m sure I can manage running a household, especially with people around I can ask for advice. Cooking and anything involving spinning, weaving, or sewing are probably hopeless, though.”

“I’m sure we can afford to hire someone to come in and cook meals, and we’ll beg Teoda for help and give her something in return. That one really doesn’t depend at all on whether you’re a man or a woman.”

“That’s true, I suppose. I’m not quite used to thinking about households that are two men. What else?”

“Everything you’ve mentioned so far has been external. We can deal with all of that, one way or another, and anything else that comes up. You can take all of that as potentially annoying at moments, but with solutions, where gender is relevant at all. The important part, I think, comes down to one question. Are you going to be happier as Aelfric or as Aelfeva?”

“I don’t know! And I don’t know why it’s this hard a question to answer! It probably shouldn’t be!”

“For most men, it wouldn’t be. But for most men, the spell would have failed. You are not most men. You are you, and you’ve always been... let’s call it unique.”

Aelfeva rolled her eyes. “Tactful.”

“So I think it might not be useful to think about whether it should be hard or what most people would decide. What matters is how you feel about it.”

“If I knew that, it wouldn’t be hard!” She rubbed her temples with her thumb and smallest finger, then let her hand fall. “I can’t think just sitting here. I think better when I’m out alone with Dragon. I don’t have him and the stupid rules say I shouldn’t go out alone—I’d get lost anyway. But there must be somewhere around here that they take the horses for exercise, or something. Can we go get Swallow and Brook and ask the stablemaster for suggestions?”

“Is this an attempt at distracting yourself from thinking?”

“You know I hate having nothing to do, how is this in any way a surprising thing to want to do while thinking?”

“Just checking.” Josceran rolled over and sat up. “Let’s go ask.”